SALT LAKE CITY — Officials with the Salt Lake County Health Department are in the process of identifying and cleaning up camps along the Jordan River that have been settled by unhoused residents.
They’re attempting to tackle the environmental and legal issues associated with the camps. Those who settle in the camps are there illegally. They also wind up generating a lot of trash and human waste, which are major environmental concerns.
At the same time, county officials are trying to connect those individuals with resources to help get them off the street and out of these camps.
FOX 13 News spoke with one woman who says when your options are bad and worse, losing your camp is tough.
“T” currently lives in one of those camps.
“It’s not going to solve the problem by just coming in and bulldozing once a week. It won’t," T said. "We’ll just pop up somewhere else, you know?"
She only wants to go by the initial T, but she also wants people to know that living on the street isn’t easy or ideal.
But having a camp gives her and others like her a sense of community — something she says has helped her stay off booze and hard drugs for nearly a decade now.
“It’s a lot safer than downtown I believe,100% I wouldn’t stay down like at the block ever. I did once and that was one too many times," she said. "I had someone stealing from me while I was trying to sleep. Here, you just have a little community. We look out for each other.”
Brooke Grundy is with the Salt Lake County Environmental Hazard and Resource Program.
“You feel horrible and of course you want to assist with connecting them to services," she said.
Grundy says the camps aren’t as big as they were a few years ago, and most individuals receive the county warning notices and evacuate without any issues.
But Grundy says even a smaller camp, like the one where we met up with her, with about 12 to 15 people, generates a lot of waste.
“I don’t see that anymore, where you have a massive encampment, tons of solid waste," she said. "As you can see from here, there is a solid waste component that the health department has concerns with.”
T doesn’t know what the answer is, but she says she and dozens of others like her will likely just wind up in another camp somewhere in the Salt Lake Valley.
“You have the option of going to jail or lose everything. Well, you lose everything either way so it’s like, those are our options that we’re given," she said.
County officials, working in collaboration with several different cities, will be back out again next week cleaning up those camps.
